1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to the field of file systems using disk arrays for storing information.
2. Background Art
A computer system typically requires large amounts of secondary memory, such as a disk drive, to store information (e.g. data and/or application programs). Prior art computer systems often use a single "Winchester" style hard disk drive to provide permanent storage of large amounts of data. As the performance of computers and associated processors has increased, the need for disk drives of larger capacity, and capable of high speed data transfer rates, has increased. To keep pace, changes and improvements in disk drive performance have been made. For example, data and track density increases, media improvements, and a greater number of heads and disks in a single disk drive have resulted in higher data transfer rates.
A disadvantage of using a single disk drive to provide secondary storage is the expense of replacing the drive when greater capacity or performance is required. Another disadvantage is the lack of redundancy or back up to a single disk drive. When a single disk drive is damaged, inoperable, or replaced, the system is shut down.
One prior art attempt to reduce or eliminate the above disadvantages of single disk drive systems is to use a plurality of drives coupled together in parallel. Data is broken into chunks that may be accessed simultaneously from multiple drives in parallel, or sequentially from a single drive of the plurality of drives. One such system of combining disk drives in parallel is known as "redundant array of inexpensive disks" (RAID). A RAID system provides the same storage capacity as a larger single disk drive system, but at a lower cost. Similarly, high data transfer rates can be achieved due to the parallelism of the array.
RAID systems allow incremental increases in storage capacity through the addition of additional disk drives to the array. When a disk crashes in the RAID system, it may be replaced without shutting down the entire system. Data on a crashed disk may be recovered using error correction techniques.
RAID has six disk array configurations referred to as RAID level 0 through RAID level 5. Each RAID level has advantages and disadvantages. In the present discussion, only RAID levels 4 and 5 are described. However, a detailed description of the different RAID levels is disclosed by Patterson, et al. in A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), ACM SIGMOD Conference, June 1988. This article is incorporated by reference herein.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a prior art system implementing RAID level 4. The system comprises one parity disk 114 and N data disks 112-118 coupled to a computer system, or host computer, by communication channel 130. In the example, data is stored on each hard disk in 4 KByte blocks or segments. Disk 112 is the Parity disk for the system, while disks 114-118 are Data disks 0 through N-1. RAID level 4 uses disk striping that distributes blocks of data across all the disks in an array as shown in FIG. 1. This system places the first block on the first drive and cycles through the other N-1 drives in sequential order. RAID level 4 uses an extra drive for parity that includes error-correcting information for each group of data blocks referred to as a stripe. Disk striping as shown in FIG. 1 allows the system to read or write large amounts of data at once. One segment of each drive can be read at the same time, resulting in faster data accesses for large files.
In a RAID level 4 system, files comprising a plurality of blocks are stored on the N data disks 112-118 in a "stripe". A stripe is a group of data blocks wherein each block is stored on a separate disk of the N disks. In FIG. 1, first and second stripes 140 and 142 are indicated by dotted lines. The first stripe 140 comprises Parity 0 block and data blocks 0 to N-1. In the example shown, a first data block 0 is stored on disk 114 of the N disk array. The second data block 1 is stored on disk 116, and so on. Finally, data block N-1 is stored on disk 118. Parity is computed for stripe 140, using techniques well-known to a person skilled in the art, and is stored as Parity block 0 on disk 112. Similarly, stripe 142 comprising N-1 data blocks is stored as data block N on disk 114, data block N+1 on disk 116, and data block 2N-1 on disk 118. Parity is computed for the 4 stripe 142 and stored as parity block 1 on disk 112.
As shown in FIG. 1, RAID level 4 adds an extra parity disk drive containing error-correcting information for each stripe in the system. If an error occurs in the system, the RAID array must use all of the drives in the array to correct the error in the system. Since a single drive usually needs to be accessed at one time, RAID level 4 performs well for reading small pieces of data. A RAID level 4 array reads the data it needs with the exception of an error. However, a RAID level 4 array always ties up the dedicated parity drive when it needs to write data into the array.
RAID level 5 array systems use parity as do RAID level 4 systems. However, a RAID level 5 system does not keep all of the parity sectors on a single drive. RAID level 5 rotates the position of the parity blocks through the available disks in the disk array of N+1 disks. Thus, RAID level 5 systems improve on RAID 4 performance by spreading parity data across the N+1 disk drives in rotation, one block at a time. For the first set of blocks, the parity block might be stored on the first drive. For the second set of blocks, it would be stored on the second disk drive. This is repeated so that each set has a parity block, but not all of the parity information is stored on a single disk drive. Like a RAID level 4 array, a RAID level 5 array just reads the data it needs, barring an error. In RAID level 5 systems, because no single disk holds all of the parity information for a group of blocks, it is often possible to write to several different drives in the array at one instant. Thus, both reads and writes are performed more quickly on RAID level 5 systems than RAID 4 array.
FIG. 2 is a block diagram illustrating a prior art system implementing RAID level 5. The system N disks 212 coupled to a computer system or host computer 120 by communication channel 130. In stripe 240, parity block 0 is stored on the first disk 212. Data block 0 is stored on the second disk 214, data block 1 is stored on the third disk 216, and so on. Finally, data block N-1 is stored on disk 218. In stripe 212, data block N is stored on the first disk 212. The second parity block 1 is stored on the second disk 214. Data block N+1 is stored on disk 216, and so on. Finally, data block 2N-1 is stored on disk 218. In M-1 stripe 244, data block MN-N is stored on the first disk 212. Data block MN-N+1 is stored on the second disk 214. Data block MN-N+2 is stored on the third disk 216, and so on. Finally, parity block M-1 is stored on the nth disk 218. Thus, FIG. 2 illustrates that RAID level 5 systems store the same parity information as RAID level 4 systems, however, RAID level 5 systems rotate the positions of the parity blocks through the available disks 212-218.
In RAID level 5, parity is distributed across the array of disks. This leads to multiple seeks across the disk. It also inhibits simple increases to the size of the RAID array since a fixed number of disks must be added to the system due to parity requirements.
A prior art file system operating on top of a RAID subsystem, tends to treat the RAID array as a large collection of blocks wherein each block is numbered sequentially across the RAID array. The data blocks of a file are then scattered across the data disks to fill each stripe as fully as possible, thereby placing each data block in a stripe on a different disk. Once N data blocks of a first stripe are allocated to N data disks of the RAID array, remaining data blocks are allocated on subsequent stripes in the same fashion until the entire file is written in the RAID array. Thus, a file is written across the data disks of a RAID system in stripes comprising modulo N data blocks. This has the disadvantage of requiring a single file to be accessed across up to N disks, thereby requiring N disk seeks. Consequently, some prior art file systems attempt to write all the data blocks of a file to a single disk. This has the disadvantage of seeking a single data disk all the time for a file, thereby under-utilizing the other N-1 disks.
Typically, a file system has no information about the underlying RAID sub-system and simply treats it as a single, large disk. Under these conditions, only a single data block may be written to a stripe, thereby incurring a relatively large penalty since four I/O operations are required for computing parity. For example, parity by subtraction requires four I/O operations. In a RAID array comprising four disks where one disk is a parity disk, writing three data blocks to a stripe and then computing parity for the data blocks yields 75% efficiency (three useful data writes out of four IO's total), whereas writing a single data block to a stripe has an efficiency of 25% (one useful data write out of four I/O's total).